A lovely little book, containing some of the renowned stories by M. Ayme, where reality is obscurely mixed with the most fantastic absurd. The characters of the stories – honest tax inspectors, repentant sinners, a man with a halo, a woman with a gift to be present is several places at the same time and who squandered her unusual talent, a man who mistook his father-in-law for a bottle of wine, and many others – exist in a world which is so real and surrounded by perfectly natural peers, and yet the most anecdotal and implausible things happen to them. The stories are fictional and about fictional people, but somehow they remind so much those around us.
I give three stars because from the bunch of stories only three of them I would wish to re-read and share.